Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time in the making, with all the vicissitudes in the production pattern that fractional employment and dispersed commitments tend to introduce. But in any significant period such as the one that usually elapses between the completion of a doctoral thesis and its transformation into a book, there are numberless influences that contribute to shaping the final result. There are far more of these than can be mentioned in the present brief Acknowledgements. Many of them find direct citation in both the material and the specifics of construction of the analysis presented here. I would like to mention Melanie Gilligan, Anthony Iles, and Kerstin Stakemeier as three collaborators whose distinct and powerful styles of thought and mediation have played an important role over these years in developing a project which is collective even when separately authored.
For the genesis of this project, primary appreciation is due to the Queen Mary School of Business and Management, which granted me the ESRC studentship that enabled me to conduct this research, and likewise the UK Economic and Social Research Council for their generosity in making this support available. The thesis process would have been unimaginable without the warm, rigorous and perceptive collaboration from Peter Fleming and Stefano Harney, in the capacity of supervisors and interlocutors. My research colleagues at the school were intellectually and politically inspiring in the time I was privileged enough to encounter them on a regular basis, within and outside the university.
While I bear unique responsibility for the shortcomings of this volume, it would never have come into existence without the formidable editorial support of Danny Hayward, who was able to keep sight of my argument long after it became obscure to me.